White Dialogues

by Bennett Sims, Halimah Marcus (Foreword)

“White Dialogues,” a story that reads like film criticism or film criticism that reads like a story, is more than influenced by great ideas. It lives inside them—plays them out, gifts them the arc of discovery and application.

From "White Dialogues": With each passing era, I know, mankind has perfected the perverse art of preserving corpses. First the mummy, then the death mask, then the photograph. After the photograph, there remained only one logical step: the moving image. From Egypt down to the Egyptian Theater, there has been a direct and unbroken lineage. Every movie is a pyramid, stuffed tight with mummies. Every movie is a mobile gallery of death masks. I have always felt this way. Whereas most viewers see actors’ faces, all I see are death masks.

About Recommended Reading:
Great authors inspire us. But what about the stories that inspire them? Recommended Reading, the latest project from Electric Literature, publishes one story every week, each chosen by a great author or editor. In this age of distraction, we uncover writing that's worth slowing down and spending some time with. And in doing so, we help give great writers, literary magazines, and independent presses the recognition (and readership) they deserve.

About Bennett Sims: Bennett Sims’s fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story. His first novel, A Questionable Shape, is forthcoming in May 2013. He lives in Iowa City, IA.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, Contemporary, Literature, The United States Of America, Anthologies

28 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 3, 2012

About the author

Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently teaches at the University of Iowa, where he is the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer in fiction.

Reviews

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The brilliant, austere stories of White Dialogues are, in their marrow, horror stories: the terrible anxiety of thought loops, the certainty of fate, the specter of death, the inescapability of one’s own mind, the monstrosity of human impulses. With the uncanny perception of Nicholson Baker, the formal playfulness of David Foster Wallace, and the domestic terror of Shirley Jackson, Bennett Sims wrangles fictional forms, pop culture, and philosophy to his own dark ends. Incantatory, cerebral, and profoundly unnerving, White Dialogues is pure, perverse pleasure. Sims is one of our best early-career fiction writers, and this is a collection worth celebrating.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s difficult to assign a star rating to this; at points I felt it was giving me exactly what I’m always looking for in a short story collection, but at other points my interest collapsed and/or the stories weren’t to my taste at all. Opening story ‘House-sitting’, about a man increasingly gripped by creeping paranoia as he stays in a forest cabin, is excellent, as is the closer, ‘White Dialogues’, a sort of ontological horror story in which horrible significance is assigned to the words mouthed by background extras in scenes from films by Hitchcock. Naturally, I also loved a story called ‘Ekphrases’, describing numerous imaginary works created ‘at the edge of death’; and also ‘The Bookcase’, about a man who destroys his own reputation and relationship by retelling a ‘funny’ personal story on a podcast.

The language is surprising and playful, often explicitly so (in ‘House-sitting’, the protagonist rearranges the letters of the titular word until he gets an apparent statement of intention: I unghost site). The book plays with recurring themes: broadly, a person being consumed by events in their imagination; more specifically, the idea of horror of one’s own reflection is repeatedly revisited, and two separate stories (including another standout, ‘Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute’) seem to retell the tale of a boy with a debilitating fear of dogs. A few of the others, especially ‘Destroy All Monsters’ and ‘Radical Closure’, take a particular approach – a Nicholson Baker-esque attention to the minutest detail of a situation – which I personally find soporific. At these points I found myself skimming over whole passages. I also found a few jaunts into fantasy, such as ‘City of Wolfmen’, unsatisfying.

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[Strega Di Gatti · Rating 5 out of 5]

White Dialogues got a lot of deserved attention for "The Bookcase", a gnarly little tale about unreliable narrators, bullying, and NPR. It's a story so finely crafted it should be taught in creative writing classes (happily, Bennett Sims teaches at University of Iowa).

Weeks after reading this entire collection, I'm still thinking about the other individual stories too. I loved the breadth of imagination here. Yes, I would like to visit the City of Wolfmen. Yes, I do mistake inanimate objects for the shadows of menacing figures trying to trick me. Yes, I've often developed wild theories about messages in movies that the filmmakers surely intended to reach special people just like me.

What can I say, I also love the 'paranoia thrillers' of the 70s, those movies about folks always on the edge of full agitation. If the hero squints he can see the general shape of the conspiracy, monster, advancing calamity ... Then it's upon him! Too late for his mental state. :)

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A set of ultra-rarefied, hyper-intellectual, maddeningly dense and complex horror stories. Very high on cerebration and low on action, but terrifying if you have the patience to parse them. The title story is far and away my favorite, and would make a great companion piece to Gabe Blackwell's "Madeleine E."

[Ray Nessly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very strong collection. Some of the stories reminded me at times of Brian Evenson. Standouts were the title story, and 'House-sitting,' The Bookcase', & 'Ekphrases' (which ends, btw, brilliantly). The others were fine, though a few went on a bit too long.
A few notable passages. I copied the second quote, btw, and posted it on Goodreads to the author's page. This appears to be first time anyone's quoted him. Odd, because this is his second book, and his prose is very quotable.
"Brambles and branches close in on the house, and eventually they will fold over it completely, subsuming it, the way that a tree's bark flows over a nail. That is what the cabin reminds you of, in the end: a nail. Five rooms and a roof hammered into the heart of the forest, where they wait, with the patience of a nail, to become ingrown." -'House-sitting'
"Being in love, they had agreed in bed one night, meant being in a state of interpretive hysteria. Every detail was significant, polysemous, charged. That was why lovers had to be especially careful with one another, so as not to arouse suspicions. No literary critic in the world, B had claimed, was more vigilant than a suspicious lover." -'Za'

[Seth Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the greatest short story collections I have ever read, full stop. Sims harnesses the neurotic, microscopic focus on Wallace with the psychological horror of someone like Iain Reid or John Darnielle. If you need any further convincing, track down the opening story "Housesitting" and then tell me you're not immediately convinced.

This is one of our generation's rarest and most undersung talents, and it's a fucking tragedy that the world probably won't see it until long after he's gone.

[aubrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me when I snort crack cocaine

favs: house-sitting, the bookcase, two guys watching cujo on mute

[Ethan Strombeck · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of very cerebral stories, nominally in the horror genre but I think more aligned with the metaphysical horror brought on by (over)consciousness. These are stories of obsession, of anxiety, and of ego. The most fundamental representation of this overthinking narrator is in the story “Za”, in which a narrator attempts to probe a straightforward message about Scrabble games for cryptic messages about her recent relationship with the sender. “Being in love, they had agreed in bed one night, meant being in a state of interpretive hysteria… No literary critic in the world, B had claimed, was more vigilant than a suspicious lover.” And yet the menagerie of narrators in this collection all seem to be unified by an emotional distance, and a desire to simulate emotion with this “interpretive hysteria.” The pivotal moments of terror of these stories are all abstracted, a man’s canine phobia retold secondhand over the movie Cujo on mute or the loss of the father occasionally alluded to while observing a gecko on a window. Stories like the opener “House-Sitting” and “Radical Closure” tread almost entirely within mindscapes that the narrator cannot seem to leave.

The two best stories in this collection take this abstraction to the extreme with a healthy dose of reflection on their absurdity. In “The Bookcase”, perhaps the most realist of the stories, a featured story on NPR’s This American Life becomes the site where the guest is forced to viscerally relive a past act of cruelty he had since bowdlerized into a party story. The titular story, at the other extreme, features a Bernhard-like monologue by a spiteful academic attending a lecture on Vertigo. The pitch-perfect satire of this closer, which manages to capture both the thrilling novelty of theory and the preposterous conclusions it sometimes drifts toward, is another encapsulation of the “interpretive hysteria” Sims loves to dwell within.

The only puzzling inclusions are some of the short genre exercises, such as “Ekphrases” and “City of Wolfmen.” Despite the difference from their longer counterparts, I think there is still a recognizable fascination with the kind of horror that commandeers the intellect. The empirical descriptions of the media in “Ekphrases” reminds me of the SCP Foundation collaborative horror project, and its fascination with information that causes psychic damage, or “cognitohazards.” These stories perhaps aren’t as chill-inducing as some of the entries on that site, but I think they do share the same playfulness of form and a desire to find the most creative ways to reach the amygdala. If you like anagrams and homophones, if you find yourself wanting to furiously scribble “Yes!” in the margin when a narrator’s thought descends into a fourth-level parenthetical, I highly recommend this collection.

[Jacob Lietz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read any horror/psychological thriller stories before but I liked this as a way to dip my toe in. Lots of captivating characters and inner monologues that are so subtle in their ways to make you think: "Maybe I'm going crazy too!" It's a book that begs to be read as if there were words between words. One should read this in the dark, alone, not because it'll make it scarier, but because it'll really get you into the heads of the characters. Though not all of the stories seemed like they deserved to be here. There is a good handful that just doesn't work for me. Concepts flow from story to story, which can be annoying, but also really cool when done right.

Favorites:
Za
House-sitting
White Dialogues
A Premonition
Ekphrases

[Roger Bundridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will, in fact, be reading all of my teacher's work.

[Abigail Spitzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

a few gems in this collection

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this collection of short stories at Two Dollar Radio, which seems to be a combo publisher/coffee house/book store/event space, because the back cover review referenced David Foster Wallace. I certainly see what the reviewer means. Every story reminded me of that scene from Infinite Jest in which a character describes in minute detail his addiction to marijuana. Not in subject matter, but in depth of dive. Most of these stories are about someone studying something tiny and mundane so hard that they convince themselves into states of crippling anxiety or start waxing poetic about the inevitability of death. Which I can get down with, for a story or two. I like the deep and narrow dive. But almost every story was this way. They were all mind dialogues (yes, I get it, White Dialogues) and there was almost no actual dialogue, as most stories featured one character observing something. I could have used a story or two with a broader scope, is all. There are two stories whose plots can be boiled down to: dude watches and self identifies with a lizard. These stories are not about the plot, but even the conclusions were too similar. Both stories were comments on death.

[Joe Sacksteder · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review appeared in The Collagist.

One of my favorite writers. I've been teaching "The Bookcase" for years. The title story and "Destroy all Monsters" are particularly brilliant.

[JimZ · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was one story out of this entire selection of 11 stories that I really really liked. I would give it five stars!!! I probably won’t forget it, because it was such an enjoyable read…extremely clever and it held my attention throughout: “The Bookcase”. It was about a person who had related a story over and over again to his friends and to his girlfriend and then he ended up relating the story to a popular radio show host on National Public Radio in the US, This American Life by Ira Glass, and that got aired on the show. You don’t have to know about that show to enjoy this story.

I was disappointed or deeply disappointed in the other stories…can’t believe they came from the same person. Besides “The Bookcase” there were four others that had a modicum of merit that I would give a grade of C- to D+: “House-sitting,” “Ekphrases,” “Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute” and “Fables”. The others I just soldiered through so that I could say (to myself) that I read the book in its entirety, and to give the book a rating.

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the whole, Bennett Sims' short stories read less like narrative pieces of fiction and more like formally playful thought experiments. That means they're probably not for everyone, but if your interest is piqued by the use of banal events/objects/observations as vehicles to delve into almost obsessive psychological and linguistic analysis, you're gonna love this book.

The opening story is a haunting slow burner about isolation and the effect of one's environment on the psyche, and the titular closing story is a scathingly hilarious (and fascinating) indictment of academic ego and pretension. Though the stories in between are just as diverse as the bookends, the collection's title, White Dialogues, is an aptly self-aware one, as the stories collectively plumb the depths of a brand of paranoia that's typically only afforded to people of privilege. It's something that's been written about many times over, but not quite like this.

I'm eager to pick up Sims' novel A Questionable Shape and check out other Two Dollar Radio offerings in the near future.

[Laurie B · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t tend to gravitate towards short stories, which is too bad, because when I do read them I find that I enjoy enlightening stories whose authors are judicious with their words. I had an expectation that Mr. Sims’ stories would fall into that vein, since this collection was highly rated and considered a “must read”. I found the stories were too deep into minutiae that didn’t matter, and I found it difficult to discern the point of the stories.

[Azhar · Rating 4 out of 5]

favourite stories include house-sitting, the bookcase, two guys watching cujo on mute, city of wolfmen, destroy all monsters, za, radical closure, white dialogues.

[Yash Wadhwani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear Mr. Sims,

You are the most interesting writer (that I have read) living today.

You introspect on the mundane with so much depth
that reading you honestly feels like a DMT trip.

How do you do it?

Your concepts are good but not sci-fi spectacular.
You've got the story sense but,
you can't care less if we're having fun.

I think it's the writing.

Your words, your sentences, they are rich with flavor.
Sometimes candy cane sweet.
Sometimes oak dark espresso.

I don't remember the last time I was this terrified by a written work as I was with 'House-sitting'

'The Bookcase' is hilarious.
Immediately after finishing it I felt
I had to make more people check it out.
Especially couples.

At the end of 'Ekphrases' I literally wrote:
'David Lynch.
Goosebumps all over my prefrontal cortex.'

And 'White Dialogues'
*Chef's Kiss*
Somehow you mixed comedy and fear
in one single dish.
YUM.

I'm not even kissing ass because I want to go to Iowa.
I hate short stories.
I really do.

I hate writing them.
I hate reading them.
It's not fun.
I need a good thick novel.

But mate,
aside from Ray Bradbury's 'Martian Chronicles'
I don't remember the last time I had such a good time with a short story collection,
as I had with White Dialogues.

Reading you makes short stories fun.
Reading you makes me feel like a better writer.

I can't wait till you release some more stuff.

Warm regards,
Yash Wadhwani

[Ronnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've come to this collection off a review or recommendation that it bears some relation to horror fiction or, alternately, to the voice of David Foster Wallace (both of which were my prompts), you'll be best served knowing that the latter is truer than the former. That alone is saying something if you're a Wallace fan. Sims' rich vocabulary and wordplay are, for sure, regularly reminiscent of Wallace. But this isn't a horror collection except in maybe the most abstract, lenient use of the term.

"Gritting your teeth, you clench your eyes violently, as if trying to crush something between
cheek and brow. What you are trying to crush is every throbbing thought in your skull."

The story I'd heard most about going in was "Destroy All Monsters"--apparently a readers' favorite--but while I found it neat in concept, I thought its pace pretty much matched that of the featured gecko that crawls onto and across the narrator's windowpane with its "fernlike fronds of micrometric hair," instigating the bulk of this story's reverie. Pace is, in fact, an issue with most of these 11 stories, and yet I think they are unquestionably original and memorable (with two exceptions: "Ekphrases" and "City of Wolfmen" both seem like exercises, and for me neither really worked). An exception to the pace problem is "Za," which is one of my favorites here. Not only does it show a definite familiarity with the boardgame Scrabble, it also includes the phrase "a whole hermeneutics of cuckoldry." My very favorite selection here, though, is the title story, "White Dialogues," in part because it shows an intimate knowledge of and appreciation for Hitchcock movies but also because its premise and payoff are just funny and very well done. That story and "Za" are easily in the 4- or 5-star zone. The three is for the collection as a whole, which I found worthwhile, but it also left me wondering how different my reaction would have been if I'd had different expectations going in.

First line of "Za":
"Two weeks after B leaves, A receives her first email from him."

First line of "White Dialogues":
"Listen to her, Bereyter says, as together we watch the mute woman mouthing something on the screen."

[robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was very polarising, for me; i either loved a story or it didn't work for me at all. each story in this collection shares the same sense of intense interiority, often returning over and over again to the same central anxiety or idea, which at its best creates an atmosphere of dizzyingly claustrophobic existential horror and at its worst (when the author fixates obsessively on an idea that doesn’t quite fascinate me as it does him - the dog not responding to its own name, the concept of a ‘thought structure’ occupying a physical space, both of which were concepts best handled in the first two stories they appeared in and much less interesting in the second two) made me skim entire paragraphs like Ugh Okay I Get It Can We Move On To Something Else Now Please! to which often the answer is ‘no’ and also ‘lmao.’ nonetheless sims is a very talented writer and i really enjoyed his bold and eloquent use of language for the most part, except for his tendency to veer on occasion into pomposity & longwindedness which made me think some of these stories could probably have have been improved with a slightly more rigorous edit. that said, the final & titular story is genuinely excellent and will definitely stick with me even if the rest of the stories in this collection broadly do not

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sims has an amazing vocabulary. I tried not to get frustrated by it, but I didn't always succeed. Had I not been reading a library book or reading in bed before sleeping, I would have about 30 new words in my repertoire.

For my reading taste, some of the stories were more interesting in their premise than in their execution. My recollection is that many (most?) of the stories took place in the mind (the story was a description of the protagonist's thoughts), and that can become tedious. Lots of meta thinking, at times interesting. I kept thinking "thought experiments," but that's not accurate. It felt like that though.

Expect haunting, premonitions of death, inescapable events, thoughts becoming reality. There are some interesting comparisons, such as writer's block and animal camouflage.

Quotes

"The law of communication is that to hear is to speak, and to speak is to pass the burden of speaking to whoever has heard you, as in a room of men who have been given the word hello." (98)

"To flee from Death is just to jog in place. Spinning inside one's dying." (134)

[Trina Y · Rating 3 out of 5]

WE GET IT BENNETT YOU KNOW WORDS. lmao i'm jokin...i'm just serious. I loved the first story, it really captured some of the creepy crawly crazy feelings I get. Loved the last part of Ekphrases (I had a coworker read it and she went, "What?" in this shocked and creeped out way. I hated Destroy All Monsters. Idk why but it just dragged on, sorry. And Radical Closure was like lol MY LIFE as a writer, holed up in my apartment.

[Taylor Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

House-sitting, the Bookcase, Destroy All Monsters, and Fables blew me away. This kind of high-minded horror feels singular in contemporary fiction. A special shout-out for teaching me my new favorite word: borborygmus.

[Thomson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very clever and distinctive take on horror. Although Sims' writing inarguably demonstrates a formidable intellect, the tone was overall far too navel-gazing for me to really enjoy. Of this collection, Two Guys Watching Cujo was the only one I found myself able to really get into.

[yasmine skalli · Rating 3 out of 5]

if goodreads had HALF STAR RATINGS then i’d give this a 3.5. it was pretty okay, writing was good. it was just wayyyyyy tooooo slowwwww and left me bored in numerous places.

[Nell · Rating 3 out of 5]

hits and misses; singular focus on creepy

[Megan Schaller · Rating 3 out of 5]

the author clearly has some unresolved issues with dogs

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I AM GOING to go out on a limb and say Sims is my favorite young US fiction writer. I am guessing he is still under 40, though perhaps not by much...oh, let's just say he is my favorite millennial US fiction writer.

I say that having read only this, his first collection of short fiction, and his 2013 novel, A Questionable Shape (see post for March 24, 2020), but count me a devotee.

Sims reminds me of David Foster Wallace (with whom he studied at Pomona, it turns out) in his profoundly faithful representations of the tortuous paths of over-thinking--or we might call it an inability to stop thinking, to hit on a conclusion you are willing to act upon. (His novel is based on the story of Hamlet, the greatest over-thinker of them all.)

The collection's brilliant opening story, "House-sitting," about a caretaker of a cabin out in the woods, "Za," about a woman trying to figure what tone to hit and how to hit it in an email to a recently-won boyfriend who is traveling abroad, and "Radical Closure," about a person trying to pick the best spot to write, all track consciousnesses trying to solve problems that grow more insoluble the longer they try to solve them, each contemplated solution blossoming fractal-fashion into new problems.

Crucially, all three of these centers of narrative consciousness are on their own, without a trusted friend to say, "Okay, just stop. Stop now." A Questionable Shape was, among other things, about whether being a friend means supporting a friend in ever more arcane pursuits or instead trying to pull them out of a downward spiral. The characters in these stories (with a notable exception, "Two Guys Watching Cujo on Mute") have no such friend, and so wander deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.

One center of narrative consciousness, that of closing story "White Dialogues," is part of a crowd--he is attending a lecture on Vertigo--but as the lecture is being held by a film studies department in which he has recently been denied tenure, he is as alone in a crowd as one can be, and he gets deeper into a darker labyrinth than anyone else in the collection.

[Razzle · Rating 5 out of 5]

h/t to Carmen Maria Machado for recommending this extremely Iowa, but very enjoyable collection of creepy short stories.

What's a positive word for 'pretentious'? Erudite, maybe? Not since DFW have I seen a writer trying to casually throw cynegetic, spicules, stigmergy, and háček into print, but hey, it's exciting to learn new vocabulary at my advanced age.

The best story is the one mentioned by CMM, "House-sitting." It has everything you could want in a horror story, in the Poe vein. Other stories read like exercises, but still hit hard: "Ekphrases" genuinely unnerved me, and I can't say that for much horror I read. I more or less liked all the stories in the collection, though two seemed oddly repetitive.

Anyway, it was great, and I'm glad I found it, because my public library had it in the "Teen" section, lolol.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

He’s about as close to DFW as one can get. What I love about his writing is 1) the use of unusual, but precisely-perfect words (I kept having to look up things, which I love doing) in a language tour de force that’s just delicious, 2) the sophisticated humor, 3) the quantum exploration of everything—very DFW—culminating in the title story, which I consider a minor masterpiece. Also, damn fine author pic, if I do say so.

Some of the heightening and drill down is excruciating and loses the reader. But this is a minor quibble. Sims is OUT there. I mean, I’d buy any book of his especially short stories. Just ordered Other Things and A Questionable Shape by him.